Case Studies

The Client is a highly respected food importer and wholesaler, with packing, reprocessing facilities and suppliers throughout the world. They have a turnover of about £50M. The product range is primarily ingredients, but branded products are also an important market. The supply chain ranges from purchase of commodities abroad through to delivery into major multiples, manufacturers and small retailers, and their own Cash & Carry operation.

Following investment from a private equity fund, planned growth meant the need for changes to business operations, better management information and improved IT systems. The client realised that managing widespread change was not their speciality and they asked XMA to review the situation and recommend a way forward.

Ascential’s high growth due to excellent market standing, top quality software and service products, together with subsequent significant sales successes to major companies in Northern Europe, led to a focus issue, mainly around profit margins and staff utilization.

The project’s objectives were to implement a modern replacement system to 220 field sales staff, with laptops PCs, and 20 office based sales management. The project was already 2 years late and in danger of being cancelled before Alan was given overall control. Within 6 months he had restructured project teams and terms of references, put plans in place, acquired internal and external resources, built project offices, and driven and completed Design & Build, User Testing and full Deployment stages, hitting all milestones and budgets and commencement of benefits realisation.

Alan initially managed improvements to Siemens-Atos delivery programmes, account relationship, service assurance and new business control processes. Alan negotiated the £30M Atos contract for TVC closure and then facilitated the programme management of the W12 programme which included moving 3000 people into other BBC buildings and the transition of IT, Telephony and all Broadcast services out of TeleVision Centre.

The Sales and Customer Support parts of the business recognised the need to improve customer image and service levels. Alan identified areas of weakness and implemented focused improvements. Using the Microsoft CRM software, which had failed previous implementations, Alan turned around world-wide sales forecasting and integrated this with new Sales and Operations Planning. He also designed and implemented new centralised Customer Issues management processes, automated workflow and a central customer information database.

Initially the Chief Executive asked Alan to audit Weetabix’s change projects, implement standard methods and mentor senior management in improved ways of managing projects. Whilst implementing consolidated corporate reporting Alan helped the business management implement new communications and decision making processes. He also took control of the supplier selection and commercial negotiation processes for Forecasting and Warehouse Management systems.

In a £30M spend series of projects, working directly for the Chief Executive, Alan was responsible for both the replacement of Financial and Commercial ERP suites of software, and building and implementing a sophisticated Automated Warehouse. The fully integrated systems were designed to manage both Finished Goods and Raw Materials. Alan lead all business teams and I.T. developments through process analysis and design, many testing stages and several implementation phases, on time, on budget and achieving significant benefits.

This programme investigated the operations of 13 foods factories within the Unigate group. All core and supporting process were analysed and then a business process re-engineering and restructuring exercise instilled new best practice for planning, manufacturing and supply chains across the group. Alan held a senior role in a team of 30 people. He assisted & mentored business managers through BPR and then facilitated business improvements in the £100M t/o St Ivel factory. Alan also was closely involved with the requirements definition and solution design, and then selection and contract negotiations for new IT suppliers and ERP, Planning, Warehousing and Product Information systems in deals worth in excess of £10M.

As Programme Manager, reporting to the special projects director, Alan was responsible for all business and technology teams on a major successful project that built a £400M turnover business employing 400-500 people. The project was heavily reliant on IT and technology designed to support high volume transactions, all of which was designed and developed from scratch. The technology spend was £3M in an overall build phase of £10M. He took the operation through conception to fully live operations within 3 months, and then through several further major business changes and implementations making £5M profit over the next 3 months.

The Chairman of CFL (t/o £50M) asked Alan to mentor the senior team through a business visioning and initiation of change exercise. Having taught them simple, yet effective techniques to analyse the current business, all core processes were mapped and evaluated, resulting in some 1000 issues and a potential benefit of £10M. Alan facilitated the senior management team in definition of a 4 year vision, and then put together a change programme for quick wins, and tactical and strategic change, for the operations team to own. Alan then looked at the current IT ERP and WMS systems, reviewed the market for new potential systems and helped the client through the cost benefit process to decide the best way forward.